1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an improved display of web pages and in particular to a method and an apparatus for expanding sections of the display based on user selections. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method and an apparatus for allowing the user to expand one or more sections of a document while minimizing network traffic to accomplish this task.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet has provided a wealth of information for uses to access and explore. The Internet also provides mechanisms for downloading information once the web page containing the desired information is found. It is very important that the exploration mechanism for finding the desired information be easy to operate from a user""s perspective and efficient from a technical perspective to avoid generation of unnecessary download of information that congests the available bandwidth.
Web pages provide several mechanisms to display additional information based on user requests. One mechanism is to hyperlink to a new web page which is then downloaded. This mechanism is easy to implement but it does not allow expansion of material within the context of an existing screen image; it simply allows replacement.
Another mechanism is an expansion icon, which is a graphical icon that appears to the left of a title in a list of titles. In the closed position (), only the title appears and none of the subtitles. In the open position (▾), the subtitles will appear under the title. The expansion icon toggles between opened and closed by clicking on it with a mouse.
Although this mechanism has the appearance of only modifying a section of the screen, in actual implementation the entire screen image is reloaded with the selected section either expanded or contracted based on the action performed. Another disadvantage of this mechanism is that only one section can be expanded at a time. A final disadvantage is that the mode of display is limited; in many applications only text and hyperlinks are displayed.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have a method and an apparatus that can expand one or more sections of a web page in multiple display modes and with a minimum of network traffic.
A method and an apparatus is provided for managing a set of expansion icons and associated information so that the user can selectively open and close expansion icons with a minimum of network bandwidth. In a preferred embodiment, an expansion flag and the information location is maintained for each expansion icon and information is downloaded on an xe2x80x9con demandxe2x80x9d basis. Once an item has been opened and the information downloaded, the information location is changed to a local memory address. The associated information may be in a variety of multimedia formats, including text, URLs, audio, video, or picture information. It is possible to open several expansion icons at the same time while keeping other icons closed. When an expansion icon is closed, the expansion flag is set to false and information location is reset to a server location.
In an alternative embodiment, all of the information associated with the expansion icons is downloaded at the time the web page is accessed. Opening and closing icons after this initial download is based on information stored in local memory.
In either embodiment, every time an expansion icon is changed, the system scans through all expansion icons and for those with an expansion flag set to true, uses the associated information location to display the additional information.